Gibson, Nathan

My research focuses on Jewish-Muslim and Christian-Muslim interactions in Arabic, and I am particularly interested in using digital tools to uncover their shared intellectual and cultural histories. My work explores scholarly networks across religious boundaries, interreligious encounters, and the ways in which texts reflect and shape relationships between religious communities.

I am Professor of Religious Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, where I teach religious studies. Since 2026, I have led the Frankfurt team of the Biblia Arabica project. My doctoral research examined the social critique of Christians by the ninth-century Arabic author al-Jahiz, while my postdoctoral research explored interreligious networks of physicians in the thirteenth-century work of Ibn Abi Usaybia.

Areas of Interest

• Jewish-Muslim and Christian-Muslim interactions in Arabic
• Scholarly networks across religious boundaries in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
• Intellectual and cultural history of religious communities
• Social and cultural foundations of interreligious thought and argumentation
• Personal and rhetorical encounters between religious communities in the Near East
• Religious polemics as a source for historical research
• Intertextuality and its role in religious argumentation
• Digital Humanities and computational approaches to religious history

Positions

Education